Claire and Rowan, running up and down the hall bellowing like walruses: I’M DELICATE! I’M FRAGILE!

This morning I was so eager to kiss Julia’s fat pink cheeks, I couldn’t even wait for her to wake up. As I smooched her, she grinned in her sleep.

I haven’t written much about her, essentially because happiness writes white. She is heaven. She cries rarely, and only for clear and well-supported reasons. Mostly she smiles and giggles, or sleeps beatifically. Her hair is a cloud of spun gold. Her blue eyes have dark edges, like Hoag’s object. She tolerates Claire with admirable fortitude. She adores the cat. When Bebe jumps on my lap, Julia does whole-body-wiggles and laughs with incredulous joy. She grabs handfuls of fur in her fat fists, and pulls them out.

Get this: Bebe purrs.

Nearly seven years ago I answered an ad on the Bay Area Equestrian Network. I was looking for a magnificent white stallion that I hoped to call Binky. The advertiser and I arranged to meet at a farm in Orinda. I took Bryan along as well as Jeremy, just in case the advertiser was an axe murderer.

It was Salome. She assumed the boys were a gay couple and that I was a dyke, like her. She had a shockingly beautiful Swedish Warmblood gelding named Noah. We shared him for the next two years, and now we are both married – to men – and raising our kids on the same block in Bernal.

She’s crazy beautiful and funny and tenacious and smart and stubborn. She’s an inspiring teacher and an inspired writer and filmmaker. I can’t imagine that I would have stayed in America if I hadn’t met her; sometimes she’s the only person who can understand what I am trying to say, and often she is the only person kind enough to laugh at my jokes. Also, she thinks I am a pathological liar, so this post is really going to mess with her head.

Some random coincidences: Salome was born on 21 May 1967; my best friend in high school, Wendy, died on 21 May 1985. Oh, and Noah actually is gay. His boyfriend, in the next stall along, was a white stallion called Binky.

This is the first day in over a month when we’ve had nothing planned, and no reason to hustle the little girls out of the house. As soon as we got back from Australia, JavaOne began and Garfield, Olga and Madeline arrived from Russia.

Garfield and I were the fierce twin Noam Chomskyites of the 1993 English honours class at Sydney Uni. We argued (successfully!) for Vietnam-inflected readings of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. We drank gallons of espresso at the Craven, watched 24-hour science fiction marathons at the Valhalla and kept Gleebooks in business with nothing but the power of our righteous convictions. Garfield was on his way to visit me in Dublin, stopped over in Russia and has lived there ever since. Has yet to set foot in Ireland.

Younger readers, consider the power of irony: Garfield and I, furious post-colonialists born and raised at the utmost fringe of the West; our children, native-born Americans and Muscovites. Never say never.

What with one thing and another, we had dinner with a different set of friends every night this week. Yesterday was tower and flowers: the top of the De Young Museum and the Japanese Tea Gardens. We had a farewell lunch at Lovejoy’s, and then the Reynoldses flew back to Moscow and I gave in to jetlag and tiredness and went to bed until 7pm.

Claire already misses Madeline. They approached one another very warily, Madeline shy of using her excellent English, Claire bewildered by the appearance of yet another foreign language. By Friday, they were flying hand in hand around Golden Gate Park, looking exactly like sisters. Oh, and a checkout girl at Good Life flattered me VERY MUCH by assuming that Olga and I were the sisters. MY CHEEKBONES ARE COMPARABLE TO THOSE OF A RUSSIAN WOMAN. Hurrah!

So this morning we slept in. It was fantastic. After a v-e-r-y s-l-o-w morning I dropped Jeremy and the kids on Cortland at noon and tootled down to the Alemany Farmers’ Market to buy the very last of the fresh produce. With all the Fitzhardinges down for naps, I made puree of garnet yam for Julia and a potage parmentier and roasted carrots and pain perdu for the rest of us. Now the house smells deliciously of leeks, and Bebe has curled up to go to sleep on my left hand.

Julia stirs. I must away!

Over hash browns at Cafe Otto:

Tash: So you need a new hot water heater?

R: Yep.

Moira: Are you getting a continuous system?

R: We are, and it’s a tankless task. Thank you very much! I’ve been waiting weeks to use that joke.

By the miracle of the International Date Line, we’ll be back in San Francisco tomorrow a couple of hours before we leave.

food

Go west, paradise is there, you’ll have all that you can eat of milk and honey over there. As San Francisco’s produce is fresher and better prepared than New York’s, so Sydney’s surpasses San Francisco’s. A word on cafes may be necessary for my American readers. Good cafes are everywhere. We just walked up Glebe Point Road, where they sit cheek-by-jowl for about five blocks. The average standard of coffee equals the excellence of Ritual Roasters; a really good cafe, like Big’s new favourite Single Origin, has no comparison in America at all. Cafes serve hot, savoury meals as well as sweets: breakfast fry-ups, subtle pastries, wonderful sandwiches, maybe a bowl of pasta. Chai is not out of a box. It’s made with boiled milk, black tea, sugar and spices, by someone who has tasted real chai and liked it. Tables are tiny. You may be sitting on the footpath (sidewalk), breathing exhaust. Sydney cafes are slaves to fashion. On Thursday a particular treat will appear in one – I remember the birth of foccacia, the friand, the Portuguese custard tart – and by Tuesday every cafe in the greater Metropolitan area will serve it.

real estate

I always forget this. Sydney is incredibly, gobsmackingly beautiful. You can’t even imagine. Glimpses of the sapphire-and-emerald harbour through buttressed Moreton Bay fig trees. The smell of the sea at Bronte, salty-sweet. My childhood. On Monday, driving home from the Zoo, warm torrential rain pouring from a butter-yellow sky. Long roads lined with liquid amber trees, their autumn leaves turned to flame. Thussy plans to build an eco-friendly house on her incalculably valuable Northern Suburbs farm with its sea view. Our friends move out and out in search of affordable mortgages: Newington, North Ryde, Cheltenham. Owning a home and having children means leaving programming and development for enterprise architecture and management.

work

I think the economy here is in trouble. Unemployment is up, expensive storefronts in Double Bay lie empty, the vendors of luxury goods being unable to afford the rent. Technical people tend to work for huge companies – Bankers Trust, Optus, Oracle. It’s not particularly good fun. The exceptions are Bill, who seems to be relishing the responsibility for the billing system at his telecommunications giant, and Big, whose dot-com may be very well positioned for the return of Stupid. It’s hard to imagine what, if anything, Jeremy and I would do if we moved back here. We daydream about bootstrapping an angel fund that would help talented programmers make connections in Sili Valley. I could keep horses in Centennial Park and ride after close of business on the West Coast.

recurring themes

The Sydney Morning Herald is truly awful. (On the trapped miners: “The earth beneath Beaconsfield is hard and greedy. It does not want to give up its prizes.”) Politicians are still(!) talking about mateship. Apparently John Howard is popular because he is “a good money manager”. Not caring about money is seen as immature. Even so, plenty don’t. As in San Francisco, we-and-everyone-we-know are liberal and progressive, but the country as a whole is bewilderingly, self-defeatingly reactionary. Cars are ridiculously expensive. (Practically all manufactured goods are, because they’re imported. Oh, and you can’t buy music from the American iTunes store, only the Australian one, because the music publishers are still milking the regions for all they’re worth.) Drivers have become very rude. Girls can be tough and sensitive now, but boys are still bullied unmercifully. The Anglican church is as good as established, and is run like the large and profitable business it is. I pointed out St Barnabas to Jeremy: “That’s where the horrible archbishop started out.” Someone burned the church down that night. To Jeremy, guiltily: “It wasn’t me.” My friends here are awesomely gifted: Mark D and Jamie have books out, Neal’s latest is apparently wonderful, Mel is going to be a fantastic doula and how great would it be to learn cooking and design from Rachel H? My friends’ children are all delightful. Graham Greene is the best and least appreciated novelist of the 20th century: discuss.

1. telephone conversation with purported “best” “friend” “in california”

R: Out of sight, out of mind.

S: Hello? Who is this? I think you have a wrong number.

R: You’ve made a new best friend haven’t you! It’s wossname isn’t it.

S (patiently): No, I am a MOTHER.

R: You love Milo more than me.

S: Now now, don’t be silly.

2. three coincidences established, via cellphone, while sitting under Thussy’s jacaranda tree this morning

• Vivienne Lander, my Australian riding instructor from the 1980s, is a friend of David Murdoch, my Californian riding trainer from the 2000s
• Illy, the Arab boarding with Thussy, looks incredibly familiar to me because he is the son of Ralvon Job, full brother to Ralvon Ilk who I used to ride
• Cass, Illy’s owner, works with a club promoter and knows Claire’s godfather the international DJ of mystery Big Daddy G

…and in fact the reason I talked to Vivienne in the first place was to tell her that I married the nephew of her friend Jan. Because apparently there are only TWENTY NINE PEOPLE in ALL OF AUSTRALIA. Boggle.

3. two events that make me feel a certain way

Jamey got 100% in her second physics exam, which makes me very happy. Leonard’s mother has died, which makes me very sad.

Brekkie at Single Origin with Mark Pesce and “favourite Uncle Big”.

“Do you ever see Tim and Neal here? Their house is just around the corner.”

“No, never.”

Ten minutes later, guess who turned up?

Playgroup with Sam and Korbin in Newington, dinner at a cafe in Bronte with Big and Mark Bennett.

C: “I’m not a person, I’m a girl!”

“Is Daddy a person?”

“Yes.”

“Is Uncle Big a person?”

“Yes.”

“Is Mummy a person?”

“No!”

“Is Julia a person?”

“No! She’s a girl!”

Brekkie at Cafe Otto with Kay, Kelso and Peter the Rocket Scientist, James Craig and the Endeavour at the Maritime Museum with Skud, dinner at home with Uncles Rob and Barney. Brekkie at home and a long play in the park, lunch with the Rachels and their respective entourages.

Me: “We need a flow chart of who’s talking to who.”

Much laughter.

Rach Honnery: “Big was going to draw one up!”

Big: “Yeah, and you were on it.”

Me: “Oh, I like everyone. Except wossname.”

This morning Claire finally reacted to sleeping in three cities in as many nights by turning into Veruca Salt on angel dust. This will sound odd, but my parents aren’t really kid people, so her relentless klaxxon was a bit wearing on their nerves.

“You might want to watch that show Supernanny,” said my dad gently. “Not criticism, just a bit of friendly advice.”

I expect they were well relieved to leave us in the rear-view mirror, but I miss them already.

We hiked (bushwalked) down to the Pool of Siloam under Gordon Falls. It’s the most insanely beautiful spot, a little golden sandy beach in a rainforest with a fifty-foot waterfall trickling into the clear shallow pool. It wasn’t exactly tranquil, though, as there were two National Parks rangers working on the trail (track?) One had a leafblower.

“A leafblower?”

“You bet! If I had to sweep it, I’d be here for donkey’s years!”

“…I guess.”

He said that thirty years ago the pool had been so deep, you couldn’t swim to the bottom. The golden sand is all sediment from the human settlement up in Leura.

An uncomplicated drive home. Jules woke up as we drove up Bellevue Road, and bleated in a professional manner.

“She’s drawing up a request for milk. She’s a growing concern, and needs venture lactation.”

“The investment is earmarked for cells and marketing.”

Two more stories about various brilliant children. I asked Kelly if she believed in God, and she said:

“It all seems a bit far-fetched.”

And Julia, after carefully examining the cat Kashmir’s white paw, laid it down carefully and picked up for the purposes of comparison her own fat pink foot.

Oh, how busy we have been. Yesterday we dropped in to see my awesome Auntie Barb and Uncle Ron; they’ve renovated their house and it’s now beautiful and sleekly modern with hardwood louvres and a Balinese porch and automated sunshades and a garage door that slides sideways.

“This is an awesome lair for a supervillain,” I said to Uncle Ron.

“It all works beautifully, as long as my passenger pushes the garage door button at the right time,” he said.

“I’m the passenger!” said Auntie Barb.

“You’re the henchman,” I said.

As we were boarding the flight to Sydney, Mark D. popped up and gave me a kiss. See, this is the sort of thing that makes Americans think Australia has a population of sixteen. There are maybe three people I particularly wanted to bump into here, out of a population of twenty million, and Mark was one of them. (Psyke and Mel, mail me please!)

Monday night’s dinner was glorious – Auntie Jan came over, and Uncles Rob and Barnaby, and both girls fell asleep so I had a free hand for my wineglass and Richard served a white Peter Lehmann Stonewell wine, to bookend that amazing Shiraz of Max’s. Auntie Jan and I gossiped at length about horsepeople; it turns out that my wonderful jumping instructor Vivienne Lander is an old friend of hers. I think Auntie Jan met most of the important people in my life before I did.

Rob and Barnes told us how they met.

Rob: “I thought, what the hell, I’ll go to this ridiculous party, and he was the only person there I hadn’t already met.”

Barnes: “And there was chemistry, so we swapped phone numbers – but somehow we each managed to go home with our own phone number!”

Rob: “So we both called the friend who’d thrown the party, to ask for the other one’s number.”

Barnes: “At the same time.”

By noon on Tuesday we were packed and pulling out of Cooper Park Road; we reached Katoomba in a record two hours. The girls slept all the way, waking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed on arrival. Claire bought some pretty flowers for her Gemma, and there was a great exchange of hugs and presents when my parents arrived. I’d been very worried that Mum wouldn’t approve of the hotel I’d booked, but it turns out she and her friend Joy had stayed here twenty years ago! Score.

Dinner at Chez Amis, a nice French place in a church across the road. Salome, forgive me, I had the pork and trotters, and it was amazingly good. Dad bought a couple of bottles of a French Syrah called Aimery, which was our third great wine in as many nights.

The girls slept through the night! And the hotel provided a hot breakfast! This is a recipe for great cheeriness on my part. The buffet is under a painted-on proscenium arch, which lent the meal a merrily theatrical air. The Goop server was down when I tried to get mail this morning, but as we were finishing our bacon and eggs Jeremy answered his phone and walked Salome through rebooting the server.

“Don’t you have a remote reboot?” asked Dad.

“Sure,” said Jeremy. “I get a friend to walk over and hit the button.”

“And you don’t even have to call them!” said Dad, impressed. “They call you!”

We drove down to Echo Point, and Jeremy and Claire walked down to the Three Sisters while Mum and Dad and I had coffee and chatted and admired the view. The grandparents bought the girls matching hoodies with kangaroo ears, in which they look mightily adorable.

It’s very windy, so we decided to visit the Toy and Train Museum. As we drove there, Mum told me about a house she and Joy had visited. It was the childhood home of Doc Evatt, and it had reminded her very much of her own childhood home, Victoria House in Warrington.

We pulled up at the Museum. It’s the same house.

Mum was a little disappointed that the toy museum made the house feel less like her own home, but you can press buttons to make the trains go, so Claire had no complaints whatsoever. And the gardens were just right for rambling around, all pines and lawns and fountains, like the gardens at Withycombe where Jeremy and I stayed on our honeymoon.

Have I mentioned how many happy memories I have of the Blue Mountains? Dad grew up in Hazelbrook, the next town over. Back when I was a sullen teen, Mum and I had a great weekend here. This is where Jeremy and I met, and where we came after the wedding. And now we’re sharing it with the girls.

Rachel Honnery couldn’t get us a table at Solitary for the big lunch on Sunday, so we went there today. It was so delicious we stayed past Claire’s nap time. There was a tremendous meltdown, but both girls are now asleep at opposite ends of the child’s bed, in their matching kangaroo hoodies. Jeremy took a picture.

Oh, and did I mention how beautiful the stars were as we staggered back to the hotel last night? The sparkling Southern Hemisphere constellations, brilliant against an inky sky.

We usually come to Brisbane in summer, when the jacaranda and bougainvillea are blooming and the city is full of flowers. It’s late autumn now and there’s no sight of the brilliant flowers, just green against more green. My niece and nephew have grown like weeds and would be unrecognizeable, if they didn’t look exactly like the rest of my family. Kelly is basically me with brown eyes and a pointier nose; Ross is a grown-up, boy version of Julia.

These kids set the bar impossibly high. They have green belts in jiu-jitsu. Kelly is an accomplished cellist and Ross is about to start playing flute. In terms of physical fitness and manual dexterity, they kick my ass three ways from Sunday. Lucky I have mass and cunning on my side.

We had fantastic coffee at Cafe Do-Da. Sarah told a story about her new job, obviously a far better match to her personality than the old one. Her boss demanded a phone number from “a resume on my desk”. It wasn’t on his desk, or his boss’s desk, or the owner’s desk, or in his email, but eventually Sarah checked his voicemail and found it there. He texted back “Ta.”

She sent back seven texts.

“What”

“do”

“you”

“mean,”

“‘Ta’?”

“It took me three hours to find that number, and all you can say is ‘Ta’?”

“I quit!”

Ross said: “You should have done one letter at a time.”

(Kelly made a good joke, too. We pulled up outside her neighbour’s house, and I said “They don’t know it’s you in this weird car.” Under her breath she added: “With these weird people.” “Hey! I heard that!”)

Sarah says her boss gets nervous if she doesn’t quit two or three times a week. The job is clearly mad. The last n people in her position, for some unfeasibly large value of n, only lasted a few days. Rather than having to remember names, the company started referring to people by the day of the week on which they started work. Sarah was Tuesday for three weeks before they accepted that she was probably going to stay.

Next we drove up to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens on Mt Coot-Tha for a picnic. We spread our blanket on a peninsula in the lagoon, and were serenaded by Pacific black ducks, dusky moorhens, sacred ibis and an Eastern water dragon.

The cousins interviewed Claire. “What’s your favourite animal? Do you like cats? Do you like dogs? Do you like horses?”

The roast chicken came out of its bag.

“I like chicken!” said Claire.

Ross ran all the way around the lagoon (crazy!) and we all applauded when he arrived back. Later, in that shy way she uses when talking to a new crush, Claire said “Very good running.”

We tried to get some pictures of all four cousins, but there’s at least one cousin squinting or sticking its tongue out in every shot.

As we were packing up, I asked Claire to put on her shoes.

“She can put her shoes on! I’m very impressed,” said Uncle Al.

“I can put my shoes on,” said Kelly.

“You’re ten!” said Al. “She’s only three! I was impressed when you were three, too!”

“It’s the miracle of velcro,” I said.

“There is no article of clothing known to man that can’t be improved with velcro,” said Uncle Max.

My sister and I each thought for a minute, then said with exactly the same rhythm and intonation: “A… g-string?”

It took us a good ten minutes to stop laughing. In unison. You’d think we were related.

Oh, and talk about the HONOURED FREAKING GUESTS. Last night Uncle Max split a bottle of 1991 Peter Lehman Stonewell shiraz with us. YUM.

I rented the car in Sydney from Borat, “from former Yugoslavia”. Croats say they’re Croatian, Bosnians say they’re Bosnian and Serbs say they’re “from former Yugoslavia”. Anyway, Borat – a fiscal conservative with a strong stand on human rights – seemed charmed by my sleep-deprived, free-associative thoughts on geopolitics and the uses and abuses of American power, so he upgraded me to a Toyota Avalon, which is the biggest car I’ve ever driven. It’s seventeen feet wide and two hundred feet long. We drove out of the airport with the emergency brake on, because it’s where the clutch would be on a manual car – by your FOOT. The HANDbrake. Right. That car is Frankie, because he’s an Avalon.

We spent Friday in Sydney mostly sleeping, although Woollahra Council has thoughtfully installed a brand new playground in the park across the road where Jeremy and I were married. Claire was mostly delighted by this, but was trying to play barefoot, and the bark groundcover pricked her feet. She came sadly to the bench where I was sitting and reported: “Sticks are sharp. I cannot play.”

On Saturday morning we had breakfast at Petit Creme with three shifts of friends: first Pesce and Big and Rachel, then Pesce left when Kay and Kelso and Mark Bennett and Peter the Rocket Scientist arrived, then Kay and Kelso left when Adrian and Sam and Korbin turned up. Claire greatly admired Rachel’s blue motorbike, and announced that she wanted one. I explained that she’s not even allowed to date anyone who rides a motorbike, but she seemed unconvinced.

I had a joke I was going to tell Big, but I forgot: now that we’re Americans, we’re amazed that there are no kangaroos hopping along the street!

Flight to Brisbane went reasonably smoothly, and then our car rental got upgraded again, to a red Commodore, which is twenty three feet wide and five hundred feet long. This car is Jack, because he’s a Commodore. Fortunately the handbrake is where it is supposed to be, give or take the steering wheel being on the other side. Unfortunately we missed a turn on the way to Sarah’s house; fortunately, we had a map and got ourselves unlost.

So, Ferny Hills. Claire fell into the thrall of her cousin Kelly, where she remains. Ross loves the game we bought for him. Sarah and Julia bonded instantly. Oscar the cat is now a gigantic prey animal, as beautiful as the day. I bought a couple of bottles of cold white wine and got deliciously drunk.

See you on the other side.

Our hot water heater went into a bit of a decline last week. Its output shrank from a healthy cascade to a sad, rusty trickle. We’ve been reduced to having London-style showers – that is, shivering, blue and goosepimpled under a tepid mist.

Scary thing is, this morning I didn’t completely hate it. It was kind of …okay.

Anyway, we had two plumbers round. The first one was a very nice chap, and quite useless. He completely misdiagnosed the problem, ripped out our beautiful old brass shower and replaced it with an ugly modern stainless steel one. This accomplished exactly nothing.

The next plumber was a recommendation from the Cole Hardware home repair referral service, and like the roofer we got from them, he’s absolutely great (Frank Brown from Frank’s All-City Plumbing, in case you spring a leak of your own). He’s prompt, generous with his time and patient with my completely inane questions. He was both amused and appalled by our existing hot water heater, which was made in 1989 with an expected life of 10-12 years. Unfortunately, he’s not going to be able to fix it for us.

This is Jeremy’s fault. The hot water heater lives in our kitchen cupboard. Jeremy’s bright idea is to replace it with a tankless or instantaneous model, a fifth of the size so freeing up priceless kitchen real estate, much more fuel-efficient and earth-friendly and very widely used EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE WESTERN WORLD, much like the METRIC SYSTEM or NATIONAL HEALTH. Here in the US of A? Not so much.

Of course it’s going to cost twice as much up front, and we need a special fitter to come in, and there’s some dire issue with the gas lines that out of pure weariness I have chosen not to inquire into… Small wonder, in short, that I am almost starting to like being rustily wee’d on.

I realize I should be posting about Segway polo or Temple Grandin’s terrific book and her theories on neoteny or SOMETHING, but all I can think about is the plumbing. I am a simple people.

Image(442)

Originally uploaded by dob.

Clairecita and Ada Boo take a well-earned forty winks.

…wildly successful. Couple of hundred people must have come by to play with Jeremy’s beautiful stars. Very long day. We’re going to bed.

Fitzchalmers Family Shoot

Originally uploaded by quinnums.

Quinn is the bestest photographer ever, except for Jeremy, who is equal bestest.

Leonard is awesome!

So is Sumana!

Congratulations you crazy kids! WOOO!